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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 10th, 2023

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  • That’s nice to hear :)

    I feel as if live what is stereotypically considered a “high stress life” (cPTSD + multi minority), but I’ve always worked hard for my health and thus have low blood pressure and am fairly fit. Because of that, it’s always kind of sucked to see clickbait articles claiming that not only did I suffer through the trauma, but I will also die 20 years earlier due to circumstances completely out of my control.

    I imagine these sorts of messages get attention because they can be very validating, but personally I’ve always found platitudes of “mitigate your stress!” annoying because it usually ends with the implication that I am automatically unhealthy because 1) I challenge myself, 2) am a minority, and/or 3) had some bad stuff happen to me a while ago.

    Being stressed in healthy doses every once in a while is not bad for your health.

    This reminds me of a good book I once read “The Upside of Stress” by Kelly McGonigal, about how if people viewed their stress positively, such as framing it as “excitement” instead of “distress,” they had better health outcomes and were more successful in their given fields. I may have to reread that book sometime :)



  • Not really a “hack,” but literally just prioritize the things you care about.

    I feel like there’s so much pressure when you’re young to be excelling in literally every field. You’re expected to be getting great grades while also having the time of your life at parties while also doing extracurriculars, and so on.

    If you only care about resume building, just focus on grades (and extracurriculars if you’re in high school). It’s okay to not have friends and get terrible sleep, school is only temporary anyways!

    If you only care about appreciating life, that’s valid too! Functionally there’s often no difference between a 70% and a 100% as long as you make “the cut” to get into college/a job/whatever.

    Objectively, the only thing you should not be neglecting is your health. To be perfectly honest, sometimes you will just need to pull all-nighters to get your priorities done. Don’t make a habit of it.

    Also, one last controversial opinion: Office hours are useless if you already know the material, you shouldn’t just be attending office hours by default.





  • Yeah, I’m assuming that’s the implications. Just more of “unplug chargers you aren’t using” and other now useless advice from 10 years ago before regulations were introduced/new evidence was found

    In case anyone’s wondering, unplugging chargers apparently only saves 0.5% of household energy use. And on this page about saving electricity on computer use, “turning on dark mode” doesn’t even make the list of recommendations. Basically the main thing recommended was “put your computer to sleep when you’re not using it.”